Update February 17, 2017: The creators of a digital Overwatch magazine have been hit with a copyright notice from Blizzard.
This wasn’t just a fan publication, though. Playwatch, as the name suggests, blends Playboy-style men’s magazine with Blizzard’s FPS, showing off the game’s women partially clothed.
Do you like sex? How about games? Then you will love our totally serious list of the best sex games.
Of course, the magazine had articles too, but the draw was clearly on the characters in various states of undress. The makers even funded the magazine’s creation with a Patreon, but PCGamer report that it only took in $63 per issue.
“We have received a notification from a digital copyright protection agency that claims Playwatch Magazine infringes Blizzard’s intellectual property rights,” said the magazine’s creators in an update. “For that reason, we have contacted Blizzard directly and decided to close the website until we have an answer from them.”
In the meantime, the magazine has been shut down. It’s not the first time Blizzard have tried to put an end to this sort of thing. Last year they fought a losing battle with people making Overwatch porn. Read on below for the details.
Original Story March 27, 2016: The internet has gone Overwatch mad. At one point on Monday, the game’s subreddit actually had more readers than Reddit’s own front page – it’s that popular. Of course, with this level of popularity, there’s also porn – loads and loads of porn, to the point where there’s even a subreddit entirely dedicated to Overwartch sexytimes.
During Overwatch’s beta, there was a rise (yes) of around 800% in searches for Overwatch porn, according to a release from Pornhub, with Tracer bagging the dubious honour of being the most searched character.
Obviously porn of literally everything isn’t anything new. The term ‘rule 34’ posits: if it exists, there’s porn of it. But Blizzard are well within their rights to protect their, ahem, assets.
The thing is, a bunch of this porn is being made in Valve’s Source Filmmaker kit. The porn creators are ripping the assets straight out of a game, modeling genitals onto them and bashing them together really fast. So these aren’t even artistic impressions – they’re essentially stolen character models being used for something they shouldn’t be.
If you’ve ever seen those dodgy toy knockoffs for things like The Incredible Bulk, Steelguy or Spader-Mun – it’s that, but without even bothering to change the name.
A porn creator made a Reddit post to talk about the takedowns and try to get the community to pressure Blizzard to stop. I can’t wait to see the state of the Change.org petition.
The creator posted a screencap of a takedown notice they got from one of their videos that was published on Pornhub. They also shared one that was sent to a rival on one of their gifs.
The creator compares it to Blizzard taking down fan art, which is not at all the same, actually. They closed their post by saying: “If you guys are fine with this then, eh, we will go back to making Asari do all sorts of things.” What a world.
It actually looks like the copyright notices are coming from a digital platform security company called Irdeto– a company Blizzard have possibly hired to try clean up all that mess on the internet. After all, it’s been all over the press since the beta – it’s not like this is a problem tucked away in the corner of the web. It could have a negative effect on the outlook of the company.
Of course, there’s a chance Blizzard hired Irdeto to takedown other types of infringements and they aren’t aware of them cock-blocking nerds all over the net, but I think that’s probably unlikely.